On the maximal strength of a first-order electroweak phase transition and its gravitational wave signal
By John Ellis, Marek Lewicki, J. No. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2018
374 citations recorded by the source corpus.
What is the maximum possible strength of a first-order electroweak phase transition and the resulting gravitational wave (GW) signal? While naively one might expect that supercooling could increase the strength of the transition to very high values, for strong supercooling the Universe is no longer radiation-dominated and the vacuum energy of the unstable minimum of the potential dominates the expansion, which can jeopardize the successful completion of the phase transition. After providing a general treatment for the nucleation, growth and percolation of broken phase bubbles during a first-order phase transition that encompasses the case of significant supercooling, we study the conditions for successful bubble percolation and completion of the electroweak phase transition in theories beyond the Standard Model featuring polynominal potentials. For such theories, these conditions set a lower bound on the temperature of the transition. Since the plasma cannot be significantly diluted, the resulting GW signal originates mostly from sound waves and turbulence in the plasma, rather than bubble collisions. We find the peak frequency of the GW signal from the phase transition to be generically f ≳ 10−4 Hz. We also study the condition for GW production by sound waves to be long-lasting (GW source active for approximately a Hubble time), showing it is generally not fulfilled in concrete scenarios. Because of this the sound wave GW signal could be weakened, with turbulence setting in earlier, resulting in a smaller overall GW signal as compared to current literature predictions.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4487e620e2293cf9c4bbcaaa272e72bed19f9690
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Citations in the corpus
- Updated predictions for gravitational waves produced in a strongly supercooled phase transition (2020, background): “wave period generically lasts much less than a Hubble time [81].”
- Gravitational waves from first-order cosmological phase transitions: lifetime of the sound wave source (2020, methodology): “er hand, our GW spectra have broader extensions to higher frequencies, sourced by turbulence. We stress that we have endeavoured to make our analysis as general as possible, extending the analysis of [47,65] in the context of particular particle physics models. We have thus covered generic models wh”
- Detecting gravitational waves from cosmological phase transitions with LISA: an update (2019, methodology): “o compensate for the appearance of shocks and onset of turbulence (c.f.26), leading to the modied expression d gw;0 dln(f) = 0:687F gw;0K 3=2(H R = p c s) 2 ~ gwC f f p;0 : (32) As emphasized in [17] and below in Sec.6, most models of interest for LISA predict H ˝ sh <1, and so (32) is often th”
- Gravitational wave energy budget in strongly supercooled phase transitions (2019, methodology): “Before concluding our analysis of this model, we highlight the improved treatment of the false vacuum probability compared to that from [51] as described in Section 4, taking accurately into account the amount of false vacuum energy converted into bubble-wall energy that redshifts as radiation.”
- Phase transitions in an expanding universe: stochastic gravitational waves in standard and non-standard histories (2020, background): “1 we compare our result with the suppression factor recently proposed in [23] (see also [54, 55]).”